


That Deathless Death

by Sera_Clay



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 08:34:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3202655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sera_Clay/pseuds/Sera_Clay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lizzington, hurt/comfort, AU. Red is locked away for good. Liz and Dembe can't live with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Deathless Death

She can't forget her last sight of him, in shirtsleeves and manacles, bare-headed, his eyes rolled wide towards her as if Red was also clinging on to his last sight of her.

She's not permitted to know where they plan to hold him, this time.

No more blacklisters, no more easy escapes, no more task force.

He's never coming back out of this box.

Elizabeth Keen however is to be allowed to live, to continue in her career, to spend her weekends obsessively running up and down leaf strewn mountain trails beneath the brilliant fall skies.

The price is forgetting. 

The price is betrayal.

She lasts a month.

***

"You shouldn't be here."

Dembe has gained weight and lost muscle since she saw him last. There are unfamiliar lines at the corner of his mouth. 

"Then take me where I need to be."

She doesn't ask. She just waits.

"This is a very sensitive time," he informs her. "I'm not fully in control of Raymond's business. Not yet."

He hasn't said no.

Liz waits, the small duffel bag slung over her shoulder bulging with everything she hasn't abandoned.

"I don't know where he is yet. If he's still alive."

Dembe looks away as if mastering some emotion he doesn't want her to see. Maybe shame.

Liz grits her teeth. She's grown familiar with shame herself, recently.

"Red trained you to take over," she says. Dares to reach out, finger the sleeve of Dembe's finely tailored silk jacket. As if she's admiring the fabric.

"Yes?"

No encouragement in his tone.

"Train me."

She looks up at him, hardens her spine, lets the weight of her years in New York, all the killing she's seen with the task force, every ounce of courage it took to walk past Red in shackles without a word, spread across her face and fill her eyes.

"You could never go back," he says finally. "Raymond may already be dead. Or broken beyond repair."

"Dembe, you are a man who's willing to burn the world down to protect the one person you care about," she responds with certainty.

He just shrugs. He still hasn't said no.

"I've started with my apartment building. There's a corpse with my blood in the bathroom."

Liz pulls up her sleeve, shows him the bandage from where she tapped a vein earlier in the day. She learned a thing or two from the Alchemist. Maybe a thing or three.

"So, you're right, I can't go back."

Dembe gives her a pained smile.

"Have you ever been to Somalia?"

"No, but I'm ready," she says, smiling and shaking her head as he reaches for her bag. "Just point me like a gun. You can do that, can't you?"

***

Even working together, tapping every contact they can bring to bear, it takes months to hammer out anything approaching a workable plan.

Liz stays in the shadows, while Dembe slowly, thoroughly gathers up the reins of Red's scattered enterprises. They sleep in shifts, one of them always awake. Liz struggles to memorize names, faces, account numbers. Nothing important can be committed to paper or computer memory.

Aram makes contact with Dembe two months after the obituary of Elizabeth Keen is published in the Washington papers.

He doesn't even pack a bag, just brings his laptop and a large Ziplock bag filled with memory sticks.

They monitor FBI channels across a broad variety of sources for another month before Liz makes the decision to trust him. Meets with him and admits she's alive. 

Aram sleeps off shift, available to each of them for part of their waking days.

They need a masterpiece of pre-planning, with no dry runs possible. 

Layers of distraction.

Blackmail. Robbery. Chemical spills.

The operations time line is a full two weeks.

Liz and Dembe target every person who could conceivably stop them, individually, collectively.

A busload of children. The thought of it sickens Liz, the risk that a child will be injured or killed, but it can't be helped.

To turn this level of security inside out, they will need to play the hostage game. Until their enemy's strength becomes a fatal weakness.

Everyone wants in on the raid team, even Mr. Kaplan, despite being physically unsuited to the task.

Dembe and Liz draw straws to lead the team. Five times. She wins every time.  
***

The Arizona desert in striking distance of the decommissioned airbase has never seen anything like this.

Endangered owls begin nesting. Desecrated Native American ruins are unearthed. Two rival drilling rigs, sent by international conglomerates feuding over purported oil shale, become the scene of repeated industrial accidents.

Reporters, protesters, and prospectors swarm into the surrounding small towns.

There are robberies, dog thefts, tanker trucks overturned and sluicing deadly poisons into dry stream beds.

A flying saucer is sighted, photographed. Three Hollywood movies begin shooting in the vicinity, a western, a zombie flick, and a teen comedy about nudists that appears to be pushing the R rating to its limit.

There's an outbreak of flu. Coyotes everywhere.

Fifty boy scouts disappear into the desert.

***

The perimeter breach is smooth, courtesy of their bus full of hostages. The raid team makes it to the unmarked beige cement building, no different from all the others, without having to kill. There are more than fifty men here, each in a separate silo deep underground. 

They avoid the elevator, locked at ground level. It takes encryption they can't access, in order to send it down.

"Be very, very careful."

Liz keeps her voice low, but deadly serious. They're going to run down so many flights of steps, so quickly, and all it takes is one misstep, one broken ankle.

They've all trained for months, lost possible team members to these very types of accidents.

They arrive safely in a cage at the bottom, exposed. It's one of the most tricky parts of the plan, where they depend on the blackmail set in motion two weeks previously.

The slim black woman with murderous eyes takes the code key from Liz through the bars, walks over to the opposite wall slot, slides it through.

The door swings open as alarms blare.

Liz motions at the woman's comm.

"Damn false alarm. Third time this week. Check your monitors."

The image spliced in, courtesy of Aram's transmitter, is that same guard, giving a slow wave.

Three rings of security await them. A concrete maze of concentric circles, booby traps, and patrols.

No time for finesse.

Liz kills mercilessly, as does her team, only the short, muscular man with the baby carrier strapped to his chest hanging back.

They can't count on Red to be mobile. They need that elevator.

The guards facing them down here today are a mixed team pulled from other posts. Unfamiliar with each other, seriously distracted by recent, personal problems they all assume must be personal.

Liz and her team cut through them in waves. Faster, more armored than the Wild Bunch, with much better tech.

"Control room."

Liz motions to the left and half her team peels away, surrounding the man with the baby carrier.

They have ten minutes more, at most.

They're at the windowless metal door of the cell. Only now will they find out if all this has brought them to the correct place, the correct prisoner.

"Cut them off."

The heavy metal bolts on the door are locked fast. The locks look rusty. No one on this base even has a key to one of them. 

The guards throw food down through a six inch grating high in the ceiling.

Liz turns her gaze from the brilliance of the expensive portable lasers.

As the last bolt falls away, alarms and flashing lights go off all around them. The lights turn off, a moment of horrific blackness so deep beneath the earth, then green emergency lights flicker on.

Her team has secured the elevator. The sealed glass and metal cage is on its way down. Evacuation protocol.

She pulls on her gas mask and goggles as the others do the same, touches the spare at her belt for reassurance.

Poisonous gas, banned by international treaty. A last line of defense.

Liz grabs the heavy door, swings it open.

The small cell is filthy, standing water and spoiled food mixed with a noxious sludge of human waste. A naked man, equally filth-encrusted, is curled on the cement block at the back of the cell, coughing.

Despite the flickering light, Liz can see the web of scars that stretches from his shoulders to below his waist. She flicks her comm with her tongue.

"It's him."

She strides through the filth, pulls on his shoulder, slaps the gas mask over his face as Red turns towards her, blinking frantically as if the light is bothering his eyes.

"Take him."

Two men shoulder past her, pull Red upright, grab him in a chair hold as though he weighs no more than a child.

They run through the increasingly murky air to rendezvous with the other team.

Bodies everywhere, the watch commander clutching his infant son to his chest, trying to keep the over-sized gas mask from slipping off his tiny, squalling face.

He'll have quite a climb to get out of here, if he makes it.

They all jam into the elevator and it begins to rise.

Liz is shaking with reaction.

But they're not out yet.

The other posts are surely on alert by now, bombers scrambled, Phoenix and Washington notified.

Their plane must be overhead by now. 

As they emerge into the light and heat of the desert, Liz pulls her gas mask down, leaving her goggles in place. 

A truck pulls up in a swirl of dust, the driver sweating furiously. There's a little girl seat-belted into the passenger seat beside him, a woman from her exterior team standing behind her in the bed of the truck, pistol cocked.

"We're running out of kids," she shouts. "No jeeps, just this truck."

The team piles in, lifting Red's limp body into the bed of the truck with care. He lies sprawling across their laps, making no move to sit up. His hair and beard are long, impossibly matted. He's so thin, and he smells so vile. 

"Go," Liz yells, swinging up and holding on, reloading just in case.

The school bus is on the tarmac, a motley selection of other vehicles arranged with it in a rough circle. 

Her outer team has opened the back gate to a steady stream of private vehicles, diverted from the most recent tanker spill up a winding dirt road and into the heart of this very secret facility.

Not so secret any longer.

The plane lowers itself into the center of the circle, right on schedule.

"Letterbox, delivery complete, dog," she announces into her comm.

They run for the plane, Liz not looking behind her as the explosions begin. Chaos and mayhem. Death and disaster to their enemies.

The outer team is all older men and women, flexible, experienced. They'll get themselves out.

Part two of their plan starts now. There are five other teams waiting to start their own attempts on other silos. One of them is almost certainly CIA. Confusion and despair to their enemies, as well.

The plane lifts vertically, engine screaming, then takes off at full speed, the engine noise dying down as the cabin pressurizes.

Liz reaches for the cell phone the co-pilot is waving at her.

"We got him," she tells Dembe. One of the team has wrapped a blanket around Red and another is starting an IV, while a third is gently dabbing at his face with what looks to be the first of a whole tub of sterile wipes. They're all sitting or crouching on the floor of the plane around Red, touching him despite the filth. As if to assure themselves that he's real. She herself has the fingers of her right hand loosely interlaced with his.

Red blinks up at her.

"Tell Dembe you're fine" she orders him, holding the phone to his mouth. He licks his cracked lips.

Whispers a few words in a language she can't yet speak, can only sometimes understand.

Closes his eyes.

"Dembe?"

Choking sounds from the other end of the phone. She's going to burst out crying too, if she's not careful.

"I'll call you later," she tells him, and hangs up the phone.

Pulls off her goggles, stares down at Raymond Reddington. Alive. He's actually alive.

Over the last few months, Liz sometimes tried to send Red positive thoughts through the aether before she slept. 'Stay alive, have faith, we're coming.' She never had any real confidence that they were being received.

He opens his eyes, looks up at her.

"Lizzie?" 

"Yes, Red?"

"Is this an AW609?" His voice is weak but perfectly recognizable.

She nods. 

"Basically, yes, with a few modifications."

Another team member waves a syringe near his face with a shocking disregard for their conversation.

"Morphine, Mr. Reddington?"

"Oh, yes please."

He smiles beatifically at Liz as the needle sinks in.

She shakes her head, blinking back tears.

\---

A week later they're at home in Paris, in the elegant apartments she and Dembe have outfitted as one of their many headquarters, one in each European capital.

They take turns with Red as he heals, back on their old split schedule. Never leaving him alone.

This operation has created a gaping hole in their finances. It's going to take years to recover. But those years will be worth it.

Liz sleeps on top of the covers next to Red, careful not to crowd him, jar his IV or his bandages. He has broken, poorly healed bones, internal bruising, chronic malnutrition. Sometimes when she wakes up, Dembe is sleeping on top of the covers on the other side of him, curled towards him like a child.

So many months without human interaction. Human touch. Red sleeps a great deal, but he doesn't want to be left alone.

"Lizzie?"

Red is awake, looking over at her, his gaze steady.

She hopes he isn't going to ask for more morphine. There's a syringe on the bedside table, though. Always.

She props herself up on one elbow, tugging the neckline of her spaghetti strap nightgown up into a more comfortable position without self-consciousness. She loves her Paris wardrobe.

"Yes, Red? Can I get you anything?"

"You led the strike team."

"Yes?"

They haven't talked about that day. How she found him, what he suffered.

She's caught Dembe holding him as he weeps, a few times, and retreated silently.

"Dembe tells me you can run the business as well as he does, now."

She shakes her head, feeling her hair spill out of the loose braid at the back of her head, falling around her face. She hasn't cut it since he was taken, not once.

"You're not here on an FBI sanctioned mission, are you?"

What?

She reaches out, lays her palm on his forehead, then the back of her hand.

He chuckles.

Oh. She touches him so often, so automatically, it's become a kind of shorthand.

"No, Red, the FBI did not send me here to help Dembe resurrect your business."

She's on the Ten Most Wanted List, now. They haven't told him yet. He's still struggling to read the paper, trying to catch up on the world that seemingly moved on without him.

"Why are you here, Lizzie?"

Red sounds genuinely curious. Does he want her to leave?

She shrugs. He deserves an answer. All his allies know her by now. She's been tough on some of them, harsher than Dembe liked at the time.

"I found that I couldn't let you go. Let you die in there."

Liz pauses, feeling for the words.

"There was no peace for me, knowing you weren't free."

"Hmm." He makes a little sound, looks at her in encouragement, as if he know there's more.

Liz meets his eyes, smiles, tilts her head to match the angle of his head as he turns on his side towards her, head still on his pillow.

He's gaining weight again, at last. His face is more rested, cleanly shaved, his hair trimmed back to his usual silvery buzz cut.

She reaches out, rubs his hip comfortingly through the covers. Not so bony now.

He blinks at her, his eyes narrowing.

Right. He asked her a question.

"I suppose, I just decided, I didn't want to live in a world without you in it."

That sounds right.

If he tries to send her away, she's just not going to go.

Liz has seen more of the world in the last few months than in all her years of life before Red was locked away, and yet there's nowhere she wants to be, nowhere but at his side.

He winces, as if something in her expression disturbs him.

Liz knows she's passed beyond 'FBI profiler psychologist bitch' to a whole new realm of scary, but she can't imagine anything about her that could scare Red.

Her body and her skills, her very life, are here so she can array them between Raymond Reddington and anything in the world that might want to hurt him.

Oh. That must be it. 

When they locked him away, he was her protector.

Now she, in company with Dembe, has become his defender. His rescuer. Not just a tool in his hand, but a weapon in her own.

Red deserves so much more than his present uncertainty.

"Please tell me you want me here, Red."

He chuckles again, but there's less humor in the sound now.

"Always, Lizzie. Do you not know that by now?"

He's healing so well, but she thought she could wait just a few more days.

If things don't work out, well, she can always take her jet and go run Australia. There's so much growth potential there right now.

He's looking at her with such a familiar expression, curiosity, exasperation, and something warmer, almost fond.

Damn. That's so not enough.

Liz wants him to light up the way he did that first morning he came out of the box, and she looked at him, and her breath caught at the sheer beauty of his changeable eyes. How Red was more alive, chained hand and foot in that sordid little glass cage, than she ever felt on her first day at her dream job, with the whole of her life in front of her.

She's learned the art of manipulation, of lying, the secret ways of power, from criminal and masters around the globe.

She wants to lay all that down now, live or die in his patient, heavy lashed gaze.

Liz rests her head on her folded arm, so she's looking Red straight in the eye, their faces so close. Like lovers.

Reaches out for his hip again, but instead just drapes her fingers over the curve of his waist. Strokes the soft flesh just above his hip so gently.

"I always want you too, Red."

His eyes sharpen.

She breathes with him, matching her breath to his. Knowing he can hear it, feel her hand on him through the covers.

"Always?" 

There's something so young, so rueful in that tone. Red tries for a laugh, but what comes out of his mouth is really just a noise.

With the discipline she's learned the hard way, from Sam, Cooper, Dembe, even Ressler's one man retreat, his resignation effective the same day Red was dragged away, Liz shuts down everything but Red.

He's afraid, hurting. He's breathing through his nose.

He smells like sorrow, and danger, and beneath that, something so painfully sweet it crosses an invisible line that reads bitter to Liz. 

Dembe, powerful, subtle, and dangerous, is still his child. The boy he rescued.

What arrogance, to want to be so much more.

She won't play any of the cards she holds. How she broke her vows to Tom. To the bureau. How she became a monster, an avenger, an exile, to save him.

"If you don't want me, I can bear it. I have an exit strategy."

He gives a little shake of his head, barely raising it from the pillow.

"But if you do want me..."

Liz leans forward then, so slowly Red can't mistake her intention.

Her mouth meets his, lingers, at last finds the welcome she was so afraid to seek.

"Oh, Lizzie."

Home is Raymond Reddington. The rest, as he promised her so long ago, will come.


End file.
